Post-Doctoral Fellows

Paulette Cha, PhD is an AHRQ-supported postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC and the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. She completed her PhD in Health Policy, specializing in Health Economics, at UC Berkeley. At Berkeley, she also was an NIA-funded trainee in the Department of Demography.

Paulette’s research focuses on immigrant families with children and their engagement with the social safety net, especially Medicaid. She is also interested in the health of low-income children and other disadvantaged groups in the US. Prior to her doctoral studies, she managed field evaluations of social policy programs at MDRC and Innovations for Poverty Action. Paulette earned a master’s at UC San Diego, and her BA from Oberlin College.

Welmoed van Deen, PhD started her undergraduate studies in biomedical sciences at Leiden University, The Netherlands in 2004. After receiving a B.S. in biomedical sciences in 2007 she enrolled in medical school at Leiden University, The Netherlands. During medical school she spent three months in Zambia and three month in Tanzania, and received her M.D. in December, 2011 after doing her final clinical rotation in the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Leiden University Medical Center. In January, 2012, Welmoed started her Ph.D. studies in 2012 at Leiden University under the supervision of Professor Daniel W. Hommes. After receiving three months of research training at the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Leiden University Medical Center she moved to Boston, Massachusetts in the United States, where she worked in the lab of Dr. Dimitrios Iliopoulos at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University. In July, 2012 she started her work in value-based health care at the Center for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States. Welmoed is a member of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Working Group, in which she works with a team of leading experts to develop an internationally recognized set of outcome metrics for inflammatory bowel diseases. Welmoed has now finished her thesis titled "Value-Based Health Care in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases" and received her Ph.D. in Medicine in March, 2016 at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Currently she is an assistant research professor at the USC Gehr Family Center for Implementation Science and am conducting a part-time Schaeffer-Amgen Fellowship at the Schaeffer Center. She is planning to expand her work in value-base health care in chronic disease management.

Ilene Hollin, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and the National Pharmaceutical Council. She recently completed her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Her degree is in health economics and policy, specializing in economic evaluation. She also earned a Certificate in Public Health Informatics. She received her MPH in effectiveness and outcomes research from Columbia University and her BA in American studies and international and global studies from Brandeis University. Ilene has worked as a program specialist at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. She was the 2013-2014 Johns Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Disparities Research Fellow and the 2011-2013 recipient of the training grant fellowship from the Division of Health Science Informatics. She is the recipient of the 2015 Alison Snow Jones Memorial Prize, the 2014 Charles D. Flagle Award and the 2013 Lee Lusted Student Prize in Decision Psychology and Shared Decision Making.

Ilene’s research interests include patient preferences, patient-centered benefit-risk assessment, access and affordability of healthcare, the impact of health economics and policy on decision-making, and the value of health IT. She is particularly interested in rare disease and pediatric applications. Ilene's dissertation research focused on patient-centered drug development for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.